Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious - for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. ‘This fir tree,’ I found myself at one time saying, ‘will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,’ - and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all - this fact - the fact of my invariable miscalculation - set me upon a train of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily once more.

Eirik Sæther’s exhibition comprises various sculptural works trying to articulate his sensation of drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life has plunged him into. With such a multitude of objects passing before his eyes, he’s getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike him, there is none that holds his heart, yet all of them together disturb his feelings, so that he forgets what he is and who he belongs to.

The Hindu kush is a mountain range stretching between north western Pakistan and eastern and central Afghanistan. Famous for its opium plantations and as a hideout for Osama Bin Laden and his posse.-It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.-

Jotunheimen is a mountainous area of roughly 3,500 km in Southern Norway. Jotunheimen is very popular among hikers and climbers, and the Norwegian Mountain Touring Association maintains a number mountain lodges in the area, as well as marked trails between the lodges and to some of the peaks.-No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.-

The exhibition connects two studio floors and presents an installation combined with paintings and sculptures made in a fast, subconscious and arm-broken manner.

-When we speak the word ''life,'' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating centre which forms never reach.-

A part of the installation on the second floor is a looped screening of the film Spring from 1987 made by the grandfather of Russian necrorealism, Yevgenii Iufit.Spring demonstrates the precision of Iufit's structural and editing techniques. It was conceived as a manifesto of necrorealism. The film combines intuition, an interest in the unconscious mind, and shock tactics (traditions of the 1920's avant garde) with social issues of Soviet Russia.

Cyprien Gaillard`s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009) is a film that is set principally in and around the mexican city of Cancún. The nine-minute film has a sequence of five parts or chapters set to a particular looped recording of "Le Feu de St. Elme" by Haim Saban and Shuki Levy (1982).

The city of Cancún, founded in 1970, offered Gaillard a landscape perpetuated by a spirit of amnesia, anachronism and ruin; that of the `spring breakers´ returning to the USA with but addled recollections, or the architects who built modern hotels upon Mayan ruins. Within the film's typically non-narrative structure, a spirit of displacement presides; time and space are annulled in the moment of the spectacle and the delirium of the carnival.

“The low wall that encloses a field or an orchard cannot prevent one’s entering it: it forbids one to enter.” Saint Genet, Jean Paul Sartre (1963)

We are sorrounded by utensils which have been manufactured by and for any man. The industrial products that make up the urban landscape are the social will bottled and canned; they speak to us of our integration in society; men address us through the silence of these products; they are injunctions, recommendations, sometimes questionings or explainations; a new tool is the reverse of a new gesture. The gesture is described in a leaflet of instructions that we are given with the tool; when we perform it for the first time, we are engaging in a ceremony: the just man who uses a new corkscrew or the latest type of can opener plunges into the fine heart of society, perceives, through the object, the manufacturer, the merchant, the jurist, who advise, suggest, command delightfully. It is out of love of man that man buy gadgets, for the pleasure of hearing the seremonizing voice of the specialist ring out in the solitude of their apartments, of their lives; tools veil from us our forlornness.

Tools have nothing to command or forbid the disintegrated, vagabond element, the wandering individual who is Ida Ekblad.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair...Skål!

Posted by: anon26132

skål also comes from the english word skull ..because the vikings used to drink from the skulls from the enemies in scotland. they used the munks heads "skull" to drink mead ..so they raised the skulls and shouted skåååål ..because they had poor english accents ..skull .. so there u go...skål!!!

New Jerseyy is run by Daniel Baumann, Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti and Dan Solbach. Located in Basel, Switzerland, it´s dedicated to contemporary art, film, music and publication; to presentation and distribution.

Michael Ripinsky-Naxon wrote there "appears to be a very fine line between the shamanistic initiations in places like the Franco-Cantabrian caves (e.g. Lascaux) and those connected with worship of the ‘Venus’ goddesses . . . shamanism appears to be an outgrowth of the Mother Goddess and nature cults . . . [and] there exists no serious doubt any longer about a direct connection between shamanism and plant hallucinogens."However, neither Ripinsky-Naxon nor anyone else has ever adequately explained how plant hallucinogens and shamanism were related to Venusian, Mother Goddesses, perhaps because doing so would have required explaining the bizarre features of the many figurines that fostered the notion of such a goddess in the first place. This is not to say that many theories have not been posited to explain the bizarre features of these figurines. Rather, it is to say that none of these theories, most of which have focused broadly on fertility or more narrowly on human sexuality, has ever adequately explained why so many figurines are pocked, faceless, handless, headless, footless, one-legged or marked in some way with red pigment.

Stephen R. Berlant Ph.D: The Origin and Significance of Anthropomorphic, Goddess Figurines with Particular Emphasis on The Venus of Willendorf. 1999 (www.ethnomycology.com)

The juvenile delinquents - not the pop artists - are the true inheritors of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and destroyed them. A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple are the living denial of the 'values' in the name of which life is eliminated. Delinquent violence is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the delinquents' inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic. They can neither understand nor find a coherent form for the direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the intoxication and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary values they embody. The Stockholm riots, the Hell's Angels, the riots of Mods and Rockers - all are the assertion of the desire to play in a situation where it is totally impossible. All reveal quite clearly the relationship between pure destructivity and the desire to play: the destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction. Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything that remains irremediably separated. It is the only game the nihilist can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodomproletarianised along with the rest.

The vast escalation of petty crime - spontaneous, everyday crime on a mass level - marks a qualitatively new stage in contemporary class conflict: the turning point between pure destruction of the commodity and the stage of its subversion. Shoplifting, for example, beyond being a grass-roots refusal of hierarchically organised distribution, is also a spontaneous rebuttal of the use of both product and productive force. The sociologists and floorwalkers concerned - neither group being noted for a particularly ludic attitude towards life - have failed to spot either that people enjoy the act of stealing, or, through an even darker piece of dialectical foul-play, that people are beginning to steal because they enjoy it. Theft is, in fact, a summary overthrow of the whole structure of the spectacle; it is the subordination of the inanimate object, from whose free use we are withheld, to the living sensations it can awake when played with imaginatively within a specific situation.

Des Esseintes bit his nails while he studied a method of removing these discords and reconciling the determined opposition of the tones. He finally discovered that his first inspiration, which was to animate the fire of the weave by setting it off against some dark object, was erroneous. In fact, this rug was too new, too petulant and gaudy. The colors were not sufficiently subdued. He must reverse the process, dull the tones, and extinguish them by the contrast of a striking object, which would eclipse all else and cast a golden light on the pale silver. Thus stated, the problem was easier to solve. He therefore decided to glaze the shell of the tortoise with gold.

From The Real Avant-Garde: The Game-Revolt of Delinquency, Petty Crime and the New Lumpen in The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution(1967)by Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe. Though usually credited to Clark, Gray, Nicholson-Smith and Radcliffe who at the time comprised the English section of the Situationist International (later excluded by the SI in Dec 67), it was apparently a wider collective work of those around the King Mob scene of the time.

In the eyes of rajahs, the pearlfisher did not differ much from the pig that noses out truffles; the labor of the lacemaker never made of lace a human product; on the contrary, lace made a laceworm of the lacemaker. Truffles, diamonds, pearls, lace and gold naturally elicited the human instruments that would raise them to their highest degree of splendor. In the said societies, the worker is neither a man nor an animal; his traditional techniques, the origins of which are lost in the mists of time, have become natural and sacred; an intermediary between nature and man, he effaces himself when he has brought the two together. All that remains of his work is a drop of blood to brighten the sheen of the pearl, a bit of surface fever that enables fruits and meats the better to emit their odor.